Retailers in recent years have been looking for devices to make pricing of merchandise easier and faster. Currently retailers manually mark each and every item. These marks are either done on the items themselves or on tags which display the price, size and any other information important to the consumer. Frequently, the price of items in the retail market are reduced when they are not sold fast enough. When this occurs the merchant must manually reprice the items by either crossing out the old price and writing in the new price, or placing stickers with adjusted price over the old price. Either way pricing items using this method is time consuming, inefficient and expensive.
Recent attempts have been made to use electronic systems in order to replace manual pricing. One example, uses a bar code scanning device to replace manual pricing. This device uses the bar code that is already on the item to identify the item to a computer terminal. When the bar code is scanned into the scanning device a computer matches the item with the price imputed into the computer for that item. Since the bar code for that item remains the same, regardless of the changes made to the prices the retailer need only input the new price into the computer so that when the item is scanned into the computer the new price will be charged.
Although this procedure is more efficient than manually pricing the items it still has many problems. One major problem with this system is that the price is not displayed on the item itself. Therefore, the consumer is often unaware of the price of the item. To counter this problem the retailer often resorts to manually pricing some of the items and/or using signs to report the price of the others. Therefore, even when using this system the retailer must resort back to the inefficient, time consuming and expensive method of manually pricing.
Another example of an electronic pricing system uses one or more data buses together with a central computer to communicate with one or more price tags located in the store. Each price tag can also have a liquid display to display the price. The tags are then snapped into place on rails, each store shelf having a rail. Each rail has several conductors attached to them so that the tag can be placed almost anywhere along the rail. The rails are then tied together to communicate with a processor.
Although this system may be more convenient than manually pricing items it too has its problems. This system is designed to work with retail items that are sold from a shelf, like the items sold in a grocery store. However, the majority of garments sold in retail stores today are not sold from shelves, but are sold from hangers. Therefore, the above mentioned system can not be used by most cloth retailers, where repricing of garments may take place several times before an item is sold.
Another problem with this system is that it does not take into account the miss-shelving of items. If a consumer returns an item to the wrong shelf, the price and the item would not match up. Moreover, since the position on the rail is indistinguishable, from the point of view of the processor and/or controller, from any hundreds or thousands of other rails, if the tag was removed from the rail and placed on another rail the processor would be unable to detect the misplacement.
In view of these problems, the above mentioned pricing system would probably not be useful for clothing retailers.
Many attempts have been made to adapt the above system for use in the clothing industry. One such device places the rails used above on gondolas that are used to hold clothes. The processor then communicates with the gondola in the same way in which it communicated with the shelf. Each gondola has a so-called controller connected with the rails of the gondola, and the controllers communicate directly with the processor.
Although this system is adapted for use with items that are sold from hangers instead of shelves it still has all of the problems discussed above that are associated with the device used on shelves. This item also limits the way in which the retailers display the clothes to the consumer since all items on the gondola must be the same. Often in the clothing industry retailing coordinates are grouped together on the same gondola in order to help the consumer in purchasing items that are designed to be worn together. Since presentation of garments is extremely important in selling the item, this limitation can be devastating to the retailer.
Therefore there is a need for an electronic system that is accurate, easy to use and does not limit the way in which the retailer wants to present the goods to the consumer.